A United States senator tried to catch a former special counsel in perjury today, and the whole thing came down to two letters: e-y-e.
On Tuesday, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri told Jack Smith he had the goods. Smith, Schmitt said, had secretly been in Atlanta for a Hawks game in February 2024. Smith said he hadn’t. Schmitt produced a poster board. The poster board was wrong. Smith had been at a college women’s game in Maryland, watching Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Hawks. Hawkeyes. That’s the scandal. Except the scandal isn’t what Schmitt thought it was.
What actually happened
Schmitt asked Smith whether he’d attended the Atlanta Hawks–Golden State Warriors game on February 3, 2024. The date mattered to Schmitt’s theory. It was the day before Fulton County DA Fani Willis admitted her relationship with Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on her Trump case. The insinuation was a secret Atlanta rendezvous between two prosecutors.
Smith said he had no recollection of being in Atlanta, and that he certainly hadn’t gone to a Hawks game. Schmitt offered him a moment to reconsider so he wouldn’t perjure himself, then said he thought Smith already had. He held up screenshots of texts from Smith’s staff about a basketball game. He called Smith a villain and a dirtbag.
Then Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked that Smith be shown the actual texts. They were about a University of Maryland women’s game against Iowa, Clark’s Hawkeyes, in Maryland. Not Atlanta. Not the NBA. Not Fani Willis. Somewhere between the texts and the poster board, “Hawkeyes” became “Hawks,” and nobody checked before a senator accused a man of a felony on national television.
The double-down
In a functioning information system, this is where the story ends. A senator gets embarrassed, his staff gets a talking-to, everyone moves on.
That isn’t what happened. Within hours, parts of the MAGA media world were running the clip as a victory. Benny Johnson told his followers Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers said Smith had “unraveled” under the weight of receipts he didn’t know existed.
The receipts said Iowa. They said Maryland. The receipts exonerated him. It didn’t matter.
The half-life of a lie
It’s tempting to call this “no shared reality.” I’ve said it myself. But that’s not quite right, and the difference matters.
Reality was shared just fine in that hearing room. The texts were on a board. Klobuchar read them correctly. The correction happened live, on camera, in the same five minutes as the accusation. Nobody who looks at those texts disputes what they say.
The problem isn’t that two sides see different facts. It’s that the accusation and the correction travel on different roads to different audiences. The clip of a senator shouting “perjury” is a great clip. The clip of a colleague patiently pointing out that Iowa is not Georgia is not. One gets shared; the other gets ignored. A certain number of people will now believe, for years, that Jack Smith lied under oath about a secret meeting in Atlanta. They will never see the poster board up close.
And here’s the part that should worry everyone, not just people who like Jack Smith: getting it wrong cost Schmitt almost nothing. For the audience he was playing to, being loud on the right side beat being right. When there’s no penalty for a false accusation, there’s no reason to check the staff work. Next time, it’ll be sloppier.
That incentive isn’t unique to one party. Every faction has its commentators who’d rather keep a good clip than issue a boring correction. But today, the pratfall belongs to Schmitt, and the doubling-down belongs to the people who cheered him on.
Hawkeyes
You can think whatever you want about Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Donald Trump. Reasonable people disagree about them. But on the one question Eric Schmitt chose to stake his credibility on, the record is not ambiguous. Smith told the truth. Schmitt didn’t read the texts.
The fix isn’t mystical. It’s the most boring virtue in journalism: check it before you say it. And when you get it wrong, say so as loudly as you said it the first time. Until that’s rewarded, expect more poster boards.
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